Review: Beware of Chicken 3

Beware of Chicken 3 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much the same strengths, and faults, as the earlier books in the series. Fortunately, for me at least, the strengths predominate.

Before I get going on the review itself, I will have a quick rant about the DRM. I got this book from the library via Overdrive, and because it has Adobe Digital Editions DRM on it, instead of just checking it out of the library with an app on my phone and synching my e-reader over wifi, I had to check it out, download some software to my computer, sign in with an Adobe id, go to the Overdrive website, sign in with my library card, download the epub, import it to ADE, plug in my e-reader to my computer with a cable like some sort of medieval peasant, and transfer it. It's a lot of unnecessary friction that adds no value for anyone, and I wish publishers would stop using it.

Anyway - review. The pacing at the beginning and end continues to be an issue. Slow start, banging middle, slow wind-down with too many endings. There's a big "tournament arc" section, and while it's well enough described, the big problem is that nothing really hinges on who wins, and it's pretty obvious who that's going to be, and she doesn't even seem to care all that much about the win anymore either. The aftermath of the tournament, though, with a battle against an actual adversary where there are high stakes and it's not at all clear who's going to win and we're afraid it isn't the heroes, is much more gripping. Of course, for this part to work as it does, we need to have had the earlier events to set up alliances and introduce characters, but still, the contrast between the fairly meaningless fights of the tournament with the truly tense ones of the aftermath struck me as an excellent illustration of the writing maxim, "Don't write action scenes, write scenes that require action to resolve them."

There are, as other reviewers have noted, too many characters, many of whom get a viewpoint (even minor ones that we never see again). But at least the character voices are distinct, and what they do and say is often interesting. There are also too many subplots, and since it's two and a half years since I read the previous book and there is absolutely zero time spent on reorienting the reader to what has happened previously, some of them didn't mean as much as they otherwise would have. This is one of the issues with books originally published as long-running serials, though it could be fixed easily enough with a quick "previously on..." at the front that you could skip if you were reading right through.

The copy editing seems to be getting better each time. There are now fewer instances of the same issues: apostrophe in the wrong place when the noun is plural, dialog punctuation, "may" where it should be "might," a dangling modifier, disagreement in number between noun and verb, some cases in which the pronoun reference was ambiguous because who "he" or "she" referred to had changed without notice, and a few vocabulary errors: pendants/pennants, singular/single, namesake/name, the eggcorn "another thing coming" instead of "think," observance/observation, brought/bought, filed/filled, aides/aids, "brace" when it doesn't mean "two," borne/born, even/ever, decreed/declared - some of which are confusions and some of which are likely typos.

What makes these books good, though, is the warm and generous tone, set by the central character, the "hidden master" known as Jun. He's been drawn into the world of cultivation from Canada, and it shows; he's polite and kind and generous to everyone, and his priorities are for everyone to get along and be happy and prosperous, which I personally think are great priorities, and ones we could stand to see more widespread in this or any other world. In this case, he has stumbled into having the power to spread his values, though he does so by influence rather than force; it's just that he does have the option of force to prevent people with different values from wrecking things, and to get other people with power (but less power than he has) to listen to him seriously.

Partly so that everything is fresh in my mind, but also because I enjoyed it, I'm moving straight on to the next volume without reading something else in between. Once I do the stupid multiple-step Adobe dance, that is.

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